Dehumanization in Night

Mike Huckabee once said, “The churches have filled in the gaps, especially when you consider that these folks have been dehumanized by this experience…It’s not just a cot, food and a shower they need, it’s a human touch, a hug and some level of respect.” Upon reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, the reader should be able to take this quote and apply it to the book. We should be able to see that no one should have to be treated like an animal and get dehumanized, but the Germans saw it the exact opposite way. They thought of the Jewish people as disgusting animals, when in reality, they are just like everyone else in the world. I completely agree with what is said in the quote. People know how bad the holocaust was, but they might not know exactly the things that happened. In Wiesel’s memoir, him and his family, along with millions of other Jews, get sent to concentration camps. Wiesel and his father get separated from the women in his family. Wiesel and his father, Chlomo, spend their time in Auschwitz working as slaves. While they are there, the Jews get beaten and killed without good reason. The SS officers would gas them, shoot them, burn them and anything else that they could do to torture them. They treated the Jews as if they weren’t even human. A way that Wiesel’s memoir can be read is that Night is an extended example of dehumanization. Almost as soon as the Jews arrive at the camps, the officers commit a dehumanizing crime by taking the identity of the Jewish people. They get stripped of everything, including their names. First they have to give their clothes. They then get their hair shaved off. They also get soaked in petrol oil to be disinfected. Eventually, they get their new “name” tattooed on to their arm. It was a number and from then on, that’s what they would be known as. “The three "veterans" with needles in their hands, engraved a number on our left arms. I became A-7713. After that I had no other...

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...Dehumanization in NightNight by Elie Wiesel is a memoir that documents the story of a young Jewish boy named Eliezer who was born in Sighet, Transylvania during World War II. The story begins in his hometown, where life is normal and calm before the storm. It quickly transitions into Nazi occupation, persecution, segregation in the form of ghettos, and eventually deportation to camps. As the Jewish people arrive at the camp known as Auschwitz, they are separated and many are immediately executed while the rest are sent off to work. The persecution does not simply end at hard work all day for the Jews, and as time goes on things become progressively worse for Eliezer. The Nazis rip and tear at the humanity of Eliezer throughout the book in an attempt to dehumanize him. For most of the Jews in the camp the end is a physical death; however, what Eliezer experiences at the end of the book is an internal death of himself. The SS soldiers achieve his internal death through segregation, mental abuse, and physical abuse that is so engrained in the mind of the Eliezer that it becomes a natural part of his existence, an everyday hell. As Halperin states, “Night defines the nature and charts the consequences of a loss of faith in the protagonist, Eliezer, as incident by incident, layer by layer, his trust in God and man is peeled away. It is this ‘peeling down’ process which constitutes the essential structure of...

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Dehumanization within Night
The author of Night , a novel documenting the horrible and gruesome events of the holocaust, Elie Wiesel expresses imagery to show the dehumanization of the jewish people by the Nazis as the jews develop the “survival of the fittest” mentality, and as Eliezer loses the ability to express emotions. All jews, as a race were brutalized by the Nazis during this time; reducing them to no less than objects, positions which meant nothing to them, belongings that were a nuisance. Nazis would gather every jew they could find and bring them to theses infernos, separating the men and women. Families, not knowing they would never see each other again. Individuals within the categories were divided even more, based on their health, strength and age. They would be judged by a Nazi officer, which would then decide their fate, if they would have the opportunity to live or if they would be sentenced straight to execution. In these camps, babies became target practice, being tossed in the air like an object with no significant value and shot at with no remorse. The more mature could be sentenced to execution, tossed into pits of fire while fully conscious burning them alive. In addition, the ones who passed inspection received treatment as if they were slaves and dogs, making them follow any command, any disobeying of these demands would consequence them to be shot without hesitation. These...

...Dehumanization has been a central topic in discussions within various fields the modern society, from human rights and politics to university studies and daily news around us, but it has been specially discussed by writers and artists as one of the main causes of some of the most important and controversial stages of universal history. These stages include the fight against racism, slavery, sexism, cultural discrimination, etc. But for the purpose of this essay I will be focusing on one specific stage, or I should say historic event, involving dehumanization, that is still causing social indignation and is still being used as a central subject by many modern artists. It is the Holocaust.
The Holocaust, also known as “The Shoah”, was the genocide of millions of people during the Second World War including Jews, homosexuals, people with disabilities, etc. which was state-sponsored by Nazi Germany, but the principal “target” of this massacre was the European Jewish population.
As mentioned before, many artists and writers have been using the holocaust as a subject for their work, from short essays to published books and novels. Among all of the written works that have been published, there is one that received international recognition and critic, and is now considered by many people as one of the most important comic books created and an essential piece that describes the holocaust. It is Maus by Art Spiegelman.
Maus is a graphic novel divided...

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Dehumanization
“Without passion, without haste, they slaughtered prisoners” (Wiesel 5). Night by Elie Wiesel explores the horror of the ways the Jews were treated during the Holocaust. No matter what age or gender, the Nazi's treated all Jews like "animals" or "things ". No one called the Jews by their names, just their prison numbers as if they were only ﬁgures to be put to work. The atrocities that happened during the Holocaust were not only unbearable for most Jews, but also unimaginable for all. Throughout the Holocaust Hitler used different dehumanization tactics to not only destroy the Jews spiritual beliefs, but also negatively affect family relationships in an attempt to dehumanize the entire Jewish race.
During the Holocaust the Jewish people were exposed to extreme persecution, which caused some to doubt their faith and others to completely lose it. When leaving his home for transport to a concentration camp, Eliezer comments, "I looked at my house in which I had spent years seeking my God, fasting to hasten the coming of the Messiah, imagining what my life would be like later. Yet I felt little sadness. My mind was empty"(Wiesel 19). Although Eliezer’s faith is not yet gone, Eliezer leaves some of his religious pursuits behind, along with his childhood home and innocence. While walking through Birkenau, the Jewish people start to experience inhuman things that were unimaginable, and many start to pray. As...

...﻿ Erika Sharrett
March 23, 2015
English 11-Night Essay
Dehumanization is defined as the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worth of humane treatment. It also can lead to increased violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide. When there is severe hatred and aversion towards a different group, it can direct to classifying the rival as inhuman and treating them with bestial punishment. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, the Jews were victims of the Nazis and were dehumanized to the equivalence of animals, treated horribly, and faced with the challenge of survival daily.
The most common example of dehumanization in the book was what they were called. The Jews were addressed to as no more than filth or an animal. When the Hungarian police ordered them out of their houses into the streets yelling “Faster! Faster! Move you lazy good-for-nothings!” (Wiesel 24) the Jews began to suffer the first steps to feeling worthless. They were ordered around, given no food or water, hit, stuffed into train cars, and mistreated. Any value or respect held for them was taken away, exemplifying degradation and dehumanization. The Jews were no longer spoke to by their names. Instead, they were given and assigned numbers that were their so-called “names” for the next months. Any historical or important surnames were quickly abolished. “I became A-7713,”...

...Important to tell your story. . . . You cannot imagine what it meant spending a night of death among death.
—Elie Wiesel
The obligation Elie Wiesel feels to justify his survival of a Nazi concentration camp has shaped his destiny. It has guided his work as a writer, teacher, and humanitarian activist; influ- enced his interaction with his Jewish faith; and affected his family and personal choices. Since World War II, Wiesel has borne witness to perse- cution past and present. He has sought to under- stand humankind’s capacity for evil, halt its progress, and heal the wounds it has caused.
Wiesel did not expect to be a novelist and journalist when he grew up. His early writings focused on the Bible and spiritual issues. The studious and deeply religious only son of a Jewish family in the village of Sighet, Romania, Wiesel spent his childhood days of the 1930s and 1940s studying sacred Jewish texts. Wiesel’s mother, an educated woman for her time, encouraged her son’s intense interest in Judaism. Wiesel’s early love of stories, especially those told by his grandfather, may explain why he became a storyteller himself.
In 1944 during World War II, Wiesel’s life took a profoundly unexpected turn when
Germany’s armies invaded Sighet. He and his fam- ily were sent to concentration camps at Auschwitz and at Buna, both in Poland. His imprisonment, which he describes in horrifying detail in Night, forever changed Wiesel as a man and as a Jew....

...﻿Bailey St. Germain St. Germain
Tonya Morris
4/5th block
7 November, 2014
Dehumanization and Alienation
For generations society has been separating and categorizing mankind into stereotypes. Everyone and anyone on earth has been placed within a prospective category. If not by race, then appearance, income, or by social standing. Although sometimes mankind takes these separations to an extreme, like trying to dispose of a thousands of people, just because of their religion and beliefs. These separations and categorizations can wreak havoc on the human mind. Some even hallucinating in order to cope with the stress of what everyday life has caused them. Feeling trapped in a label you can’t seem to shed no matter how hard you work to change can be infuriating, and that constant battle of back and forth within the mind can do dangerous things. Although Wiesel writes a memoir and Kafka writes an expressionist novella, both stories use symbols to further their themes of alienation and dehumanization.
Night is a memoir by Elie Wiesel. Within his enthralling narrative he depicts his period spent within Auschwitz during World War two, and how he managed to endure and outlive the camps ill-treatment. He describes his first experience in Auschwitz, upon his entrance into the camp. “Men to the left! Women to the right!...

...NIGHT ESSAY
The Jews were dehumanized in many ways by the Nazi’s. Dehumanization is making humans feel like less than people. Three ways the Nazis dehumanized the Jews was by starvation, being treated like animals and, physical abuse. Here are examples of all three of those dehumanizing methods.
The first way the Nazis dehumanized Jews was by treating them like animals. They did this in many ways. One way was by putting 80 people in a cattle car. “ The police made us climb into cars, eighty persons in each one”(pg.22). The Jews couldn’t move at all, they also had limited food and water. Another way they were dehumanized was that they had to go the bathroom in the corner of the cattle cars. This is dehumanizing because the Jews feel like they are being completely insulted. Another example of being treated like animals was that after someone was killed Eliezer said “That night the soup tasted of corpses”(pg.65) This means that the Nazis didn't care about the jews. This also shows the Nazis did it on purpose to make the jews feel bad about eating, even though they have to if they want to survive. That is how the Nazis dehumanized the Jews.
The Nazis also dehumanized the Jews by starving them. This was very effective because it would make the jews very weak and would make them do anything for food. One example of the Nazis starving the jews would be when somebody was being hanged one of the prisoners said to Eliezer “this...